Clayton Eshleman
Wesleyan University Press ($29.95)

by Sarah Fox

In his 1981 collection of poems Our Lady of the Three Pronged Devil, Clayton Eshleman concludes his introduction with the following:

As species disappear, the Paleolithic grows more vivid. As living animals disappear, the first outlines become dear, not as reflections of a day world, but as the primal contours of psyche, the shaping of the underworld, the point at which Hades was an animal. The new wilderness (Jerome Rothenberg's phrase) is thus, to give it my own turn, the spectral realm created by the going out of animal life and the coming in, in our time, of these primary outlines. Our tragedy is to search further and further back for a common non-racial trunk in which the animal is not separated out of the human while we destroy the turf on which we actually stand.

This introduction and many of the poems which follow it reappear in Juniper Fuse, the passionate and visionary summit of an unusual creative project: translating and reintegrating the narrative of awakening humanity as depicted within psychic wombs on the cave walls of southwestern Europe. Artfully traveling along the faultlines of a burgeoning consciousness, at every opportunity submerging himself in the abyss of extrasensory and intra-millennial realities, Eshleman fuses his imagination to the plight of the Cro-Magnon and locates the birth of metaphor at the parallax Fall, when awareness of separation from both animal and mother lit the mind and delivered art. In “Placements I: ‘The New Wilderness,’” Eshleman writes: "At arm's length the image, my focus the extent of my reach. Where I end the other begins. And is not all art which genuinely moves us done in the 'dark' against a 'wall'? Olson's whisper (a prayer), '(boundary) / Disappear.'"

Eshleman, as his devotees are well aware, has been immersed in this source for over 25 years, and Juniper Fuse, his "saturation job" á la Charles Olson, is indeed a unique achievement. Inspired by the work of a vast array of thinkers—Rimbaud, Norman O. Brown, Mikhail Bakhtin, Wallace Stevens, James Hillman, Sandor Ferenczi—Eshleman has constructed the book on hinges that join poetry to prose to epistle to image to dream to myth. He aims to "make use of a pluralistic approach that may result in a fuller 'reading' of Upper Paleolithic imagination than archeological or literary approaches alone might yield," and further notes that "as a poet's book, Juniper Fuse is an attempt to reclaim the caves of the Dordogne and the Pyrénées for poets as geo-mythical sites in which early intimations of what we call 'muse' may have been experienced." As poet, scholar, and explorer, Eshleman interviews poetry's potential throughout, and in both prose and verse accomplishes a rare lyric force. His "Notes on a Visit to Le Tuc D'Audoubert," for example, incorporates drawn images copied from cave walls with projective verse and linguistic equations—language as symbol, as mark.

A core essay, "Placements II: 'The Aranea Constellation'" (originally published by Rain Taxi as part of their Brainstorm Series of chapbooks) saturates its prose with poetry ("An Aranea centered in her web, afloat yet anchored between ground and sky. The natural mind of the earth always spinning"), poets (Vallejo, Rimbaud, Artaud, Whitman, Ginsberg), and scholarship ("I see in the Cretan labyrinth not only the ancient ghost of a spider-centered web but Paleolithic man leaving a living site and becoming a hunter following the herds, thus entering the mythos of killing and sacrifice.") In this essay, Eshleman reimagines the myth of the labyrinth, placing the artist in Ariadne's stead: "The transformation of the 'given life' to a 'creative' one not only involves entering a dark or 'inner' life, but generating as well a resistance substantial enough to test oneself against and to shape the focus of one's work." Much archeological examination is referenced throughout with generous quotations riffing off Eshleman's lyrical musings.

A refreshing, and even loving, reinterpretation of the Feminine as source and power ("The Mothers of Lascaux flayed the penises of the Fathers") finds its advocate in Eshleman's voice. Pondering Sandor Ferenczi's Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, he provides an alteration on an "essentially masculine viewpoint" with his "Thalassa Variations," an erotic and ambitious poem-as-vulva. The entire book probes womb/wound as symbolic naissance of metaphor, thus thought. One considers the illiterate María Sabina chanting from ground zero of Language. Her source—literally the mushroom, spiritually "The Source" (earth, memory, imagination)—is Eshleman's, Cro-Magnon's, and ours. An especially arresting narrative in the book involves the author attempting to "nurse" from his analyst's finger, a memory he encounters after breaking his ankle in an accident and spending the night spontaneously hallucinating in his ditch-bound car. He likens this experience to the eating of amanita muscaria mushrooms, having seen slugs writhing postprandially near a patch of the red and white fungi earlier in the day, and describes how he symbolically "crawled to the bottom of a 'wild' cave, which clawed out at me as I attempted to emerge." Birth imagery is hardly avoidable, but Eshleman handles it with kaleidoscopic exuberance and grace. Fond references are frequently made to his wife Caryl—an obvious comrade in this adventure—and to prominent feminist thinkers such as Adrienne Rich and Barbara Walker.

In fact, every piece in the book works in collaboration with the facts and imaginings Eshleman has encountered on his journey (e.g. "I felt the broken horse rear in agony in the cave-like stage of Picasso's Guernica . . . ")—the breadcrumb trail leading from Cro-Magnon to Microchip. It is this sense of collaboration which gives the book its grand scope and spirit of generosity. Eshleman avoids staking personal claim on his findings but rather allows them to ignite and to direct his readers' imaginations as he connects the dots from cave wall to mind to page. The book is abundantly useful, as I believe it is meant to be—a rich, brilliant, exalted source for the artist, the thinker, the human.

An attempt to "analyze" this work seems antithetical to its purposes, for to enter the book is to enter the cave: it is altering and singular, hallucinatory, tragic, ecstatic. The scholarship is exhaustive and painstakingly elaborated in the "Notes and Commentary" section at book's end, while a quick glance at the bibliography provides an ample syllabus for at least a decade's worth of "saturation." Cave images, diagrams, and photographs accompany both prose and poetry, and are nicely showcased in a full-color section in the book's middle. As a life's work, the volume is unusual for a poet and therefore especially valuable: its form—essay, verse, image, scholarship—is "multifolate" and entirely unpredictable. Juniper Fuse is pan-poetic spelunksmanship, alchemical book of shadows, psychic journey extraordinaire. From inside the womb of the human mind, Eshleman has traced an archetypal (and, according to Eliot Weinberger, "Post-Darwinian") evolution, delivering from it his own lyrical documentation of origin's myth.

With such a rare and important work at stake, one only wishes that its prominent university press publisher had laid out the text with more reasonable margins (the left margin, occasionally used for photographs or drawings, is a generous two inches, while the right almost flows into the spine, making the task of reading occasionally arduous). That aside, the overall design is beautiful, and the inclusion of color reproductions essential to the book's gravity as a contribution to American poetry, art history, human psychology, and archeological investigation. Juniper Fuse is an indispensable guide to the human imagination, and can't be recommended highly enough.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

Jim Ray Daniels
Michigan State University Press ($22.95)

by Dustin Michael

Close to the beginning of "A Fistful of Yen," the sprawling goofball chop-socky spoof in the messy 1977 cult favorite The Kentucky Fried Movie, the evil kung-fu warlord is doling out punishments to his captives. A ragged man in chains is dragged from the dungeon. Unrepentant, he spits on the warlord's feet. "Send him to... Detroit!" commands the warlord sadistically, having sentenced another prisoner to death for a lesser offense only seconds before.

Jim Ray Daniels's Detroit Tales is a collection of short stories that does everything it can to confirm all of our greatest fears regarding the Motor City. It is a book that makes you uneasy, especially if you live in the Midwest; with each piece, the city becomes a little darker, a little more ominous, until it seems perched at the top of the country like a dilapidated gargoyle ready to fall on your car (which, ironically, probably rolled off an assembly line there). Each story leaves you feeling like you've just learned something nasty about the people in the house up the block.

These are stories of grime and metal, of characters whose sparks burn out in dingy corners like the fiery shards of steel that have been power-sanded off formless automotive parts by cold mechanical arms. They are stories of the Factory—of its slaves, its victims, and the people who exist beneath its shadow and lead leery lives. In short, these are modern tales of the dragon and the villagers.

Gerry, who narrates the opening story, "Islands," manages to do what almost every other character in the book only thinks about doing: He packs up and gets the hell out of Motor City before it guzzles up all his fuel. A reformed drug user turned civic-minded father figure, Gerry now picks crack vials out of the flowers he and his wife have planted on a traffic island. But once we've met Gerry—a man semi-devoted to turning his sketchy neighborhood around—Daniels bombards us with a menagerie of burn-outs, a line-up of suspects hauled in to answer the accusation, "Whose fault is it the neighborhood turned to crud in the first place?" There's Carl, the Mad Dog-swilling street tough who terrorizes the corner candy/liquor store; Kenny, the pot-bellied, Hog-riding 'Nam vet who crashes his high school-aged brother's block party and beats up his friends; and Ed, the dopey teenager who's too stoned on Christmas Eve to realize he's breaking his infirm mother's heart. The list of culprits goes on, each guilty of what seems to be Detroit's most common crime: being not bad enough to be incarcerated or chased out of town, but not good enough to make the city even a slightly better place to live.

There are no bold heroes in Detroit Tales, no steel-eyed archers to rise up, draw back, and shoot arrows to jam the grinding cogs of the motor dragon; these are tales of coping, of making do under the looming fog fists of the factories. The triumphs in them are subtle ones: The church deposes a minister for questionable sexual conduct with a minor but the minor's family stands behind him; a sullen loser gets over the crush he had on his dead cousin and brings himself to toss out her old album collection; a likeable gal who won't have sex with her slob boyfriend has a party and invites him and her promiscuous friend, and... well, that one's only a fleeting triumph. Often victory amounts to things staying the same as opposed to getting worse, but in Detroit, that's cause enough for celebration—so crack open a Pabst, call whatever relatives and friends haven't died horribly in factory accidents or drug overdoses, and count yourself lucky to have clocked out another day.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

Thomas E. Kennedy
Wynkin deWorde (£21.72)

by Linda Lappin

Thomas E. Kennedy, an American writer based in Denmark, has just come forth with the second volume of his Copenhagen Quartet. This ambitious and multifaceted project follows on the modernist tradition of novels celebrating the spirit of the world's great cities, with their many moods and stories: Joyce's Dublin, Durrell's Alexandria, Anais Nin and Henry Miller's Paris.

In the first volume, Kerrigan's Copenhagen, an American writer romped in picaresque style across the city, researching a book about the bars and eateries of his adopted home. Accompanied by a seductive Research Assistant, Kerrigan led the reader on a series of gourmet and erotic adventures, while offering a whirlwind introduction into the cultural history of this Northern capital. Set in spring, the novel told the story of autumnal lovers reawakening to the pleasures of life.

Bluett's Blue Hours, by contrast, is set in mid-winter—when the long Nordic nights drive the wolves out on the prowl in search of satisfaction. Essentially a mystery, it explores the darker moods of Copenhagen en noire. Bluett, an American translator adrift after his divorce, gropes through a mist of vodka and jazz trying not to lose contact with the few things that keep him human: his children—at once affectionate, exploitive, indifferent— his sexual appetites, and his only real friend, Sam. Sex-starved and lonely, Bluett looks up an old flame, but her demands for commitment put him off. Sam instead embarks upon an exciting affair with a mysterious Russian blonde, arousing Bluett's envy. Soon after, Sam is found dead, with his head in a plastic bag and his hands bound with a necktie.

Sam's unexpected death drags Bluett into the eerie underworld of Copenhagen's sex clubs. Bluett's most unsettling discovery is Sam's diary recounting a life-long battle against self-depravity. Disbelief, pity, disgust, curiosity—a prickle of jealousy and a dash of voyeurism—all spur Bluett on to investigate Sam's secrets, putting his own life at risk while grappling with a troubling question: how far can the pursuit of pleasure go between consenting adults before becoming destructive? With one eye focused on the corruption within and the other on the dangers without, Bluett stumbles on towards an acceptance of human carnality and relationship, our heritage of "mire and blood."

A key theme in Kennedy's work is the search for verisimilitude—the means through which writers create a semblance of reality and transform the stuff of life into a fiction. In Kerrigan's Copenhagen, Kennedy structured the novel like a tourist's guidebook; each chapter is set in a bar or eating place, the name and address of which are printed in the heading. In Bluett's Blue Hours, music, especially jazz, sets the tone for many scenes, while the chapters bear the names of songs. Instead of a table of contents, a "soundtrack" appears at the beginning of the novel, so that readers can imagine (or even listen to) the selections, thus entering into the proper mood as story progresses. These strategies eke away the boundaries between reality and fiction, while drawing the reader even deeper into the narrative web.

Only halfway through his projected Quartet, Thomas E. Kennedy presents a complex picture of contemporary Copenhagen. His characters—spiritually dispossessed, victims of cancer, crime, divorce, exile, and political persecution—struggle through solitude and hunger to find a simple and stark faith in life. Joy, love, fear, rage, lust, horror: all find a place in these rich and insightful novels.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

Robert Glück
Clear Cut Press ($12.95)

by Gail Scott

For me, the arbitrary status of The Review as respected judgment based on common notions of value seems disingenuous. Reading is a conversation, a dance, and the music in our reading-heads a potpourri of the cultural, historical space we read from—and toward. I will say right away that for some time I have been in conversation with Robert Glück about innovative prose, and I am a fan of his limpid, textured, and very funny fiction. Not that we agree about everything. I come from northeastern predominately French-speaking Québec, and Bob is a Californian: we pull the narrative blanket in different directions. Yet reading his fiction utterly satisfies both my Euro-inflected desire for writing-as-thinking and my North American love of glass surface. Denny Smith, Glück's most recent collection of stories—the first in 10 years, just published with novelist Matthew Stadler's new publishing company, Clear Cut Press—is impressive in this respect.

The 12 stories here are gems of plastic composition, of remarkable narrative adeptness, complete with the diversionary tactics, the asides, the aphoristic pauses that multiply layers of awareness and reading pleasure in the best contemporary fiction. In prose, it is extremely difficult to offer pleasure and the contradictory path to knowledge in the same breath. How—without missing a beat—does the lover in the title story, who is being dumped in a pretty café garden, end up in a compromising conversation with Imelda Marcos, wearing a polka dot scarf, picking a thread off his jacket and calling him a Momma's boy? "We don't talk about betrayal, but I wonder, Can I talk about my life without altering it?" asks the narrator after losing his half-crippled father's money to a boardwalk con artist to whom the wayward son is attracted. Another story, "Batlike, Wolflike (A Memoir)," beats a desperate moonlit tune as the excessively earthy narrator rushes to meet the classy lover known as Your Majesty. What is incredible about this story is the way the subtitles (Edible, Tasting, Waiting) and the movement of sentences emphasize the "animal passions" while the narrator participates in the usual civic gestures, such as getting on and off planes: "Yes, that's him, sprawled at the back of the waiting area in Newark, someone's smoke drifting across his lack of expression."

These stories are as private as autobiography yet splayed into culture. Everywhere the lover's greed is framed by the kitschy articles of consumerism that help construct him: the triangle of lime in the plastic cup; the plaid seat airplane upholstery; the blue bubbles in the glass of Calistoga on the café table when Denny Smith is dumping him; the "American" boys in the recycled porn magazine he masturbates to in "Workload." One of these boys, J.T., "visits me after this story is published—things like that happen. My pain does not diminish; it continues as its own story read at the same time as other stories. If they all take the shape of J.T. getting fucked, perhaps there is more content in the world than form . . ." This last might be read as a dig at the Language poets, with whom Glück, as a "new-narrative" writer, found himself arguing at the beginning of his career. Or it might be about balance and proportion in any work of art. Does the hero lack an identity, a Dad? whines the narrator. And empathy does a two-step, somewhere between pity and laughter.

It's rare that fiction mirrors the immortal authors who get quoted in exegesis. This book is a breathing exposition of the Artaud citation introducing "Forced Story: Conviction": "From this pain rooted in me like a wedge, at the center of my purest reality, at the point of my sensibility where the two worlds of body and mind are joined, I learn to distract myself by the effect of a false suggestion. . . ." Its fey gay narrator makes us glad an older man is writing about sex, his stories jerking and loving their way through adolescent memoria, suburban tracts, a Tijuana shopping arcade, a Women's Clinic (where the narrator's a hapless sperm donor) until he becomes one of "The Purple Men" and "Purple Men 2000," the lovely end pieces of the collection. These are tableaux vivants, bathed in purple, decomposing and recomposing; they could be paintings. But the pretty opening tableau, starring Trent and Daryl, turns out to have been inspired by a 1978 scientific experiment that caused purple dye to spread through whole bodies when painted on two gay men's anuses before sex. In a typical Glück turnaround, the piece builds into a wonderful inside/outside portrait, tracing gay history from the halcyon pre-AIDS period, through AIDS and beyond. I will end with its opening sally, which says more than I can about how Glück's narrating, proceeding with clear little baby steps, sends us flying into the abyss that underscores history:

They are not entirely purple yet. They have purple shadows and the space around them protects and simplifies their nakedness with pinks and salmons of undifferentiated flesh. One man reaches through the other's crotch to pin down a wrist, getting a spot of purple, I guess, on his forearm. The scene may be naturalistic, but it conveys the interior effulgence of the lovers, sensual immersion akin to repose, power unconfined by definite boundaries. Really they are just wildlife in the garden. They strain away and toward and also try to remain still. White-coats-of-objectivity peer through one-way glass.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

John Barth
Houghton Mifflin ($24)

by Alicia L. Conroy

The world of letters would be noticeably more tame without John Barth—erudite, playful, enamored of adolescent sexual punning, foot soldier in the vanguard of postmodernism. We have come to expect that he will tilt at windmills for us, wake us from complacency with a cold splash to the face. Said Barth's appeal is both limited by and centered in his practice of metafiction, in which the puppet-master is part of the performance and the show celebrates artifice. For this, writers often love to read Barth, while readers who prefer the captivating dream of verisimilitude run screaming.

Barth's new collection of short stories is likely to ruffle feathers, and for all the wrong reasons. What will unnerve some is the author's attempt to recognize and react to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Barth doesn't provide a catharsis of the kind that many readers will demand—especially in response to events whose very date has become a code-word for atrocity—yet his approach is as honest as any anguished outcry because it is so characteristically his.

The tales in Barth's first fiction collection, the brilliant Lost in the Funhouse (1968), offered a range of positions on the experimental spectrum. The superb formal structure of the collection enriched the stories and delivered that holy grail of overall unity; moreover, Funhouse asserted that the need to tell stories, and the mode of their telling, were subjects as valid as the mimicry of life. Barth's most recent novel, Coming Soon!!! (2002) continued to mine the vein of metafiction with its tale of an aging novelist and his protégé, a showboat, Edna Ferber's Showboat, and . . . well, it's Barth. One mere linear sentence won't carry it off.

The title of Barth's new collection, The Book of Ten Nights and a Night, showboats a reference to mythic yarn-spinner Scheherazade for a reason. Like the classical Thousand and One Nights, these stories are framed within the time-honored narrative basket that characterizes the tellers—pilgrims en route to Canterbury, captive Arabian sex slave, etc. With typical Barthian complexity, there's an unnamed Original Author; his narrator, Graybard; and the muse of imagination, classically female and Barthically tagged WYSIWYG (i.e., what you see is what you get). The September 11 attacks interrupt the Author's progress, thus permitting Barth to involve those tragedies in his character-author's life through the frame-episodes.

The stories themselves are "vintage" Barth, both in the sense of a distinctive voice and approach, and in the sense of invoking age and its perspectives as a subject. Characters in these mostly metafictional tales, many of them "seniors" sandwiched between middle age and deathbed, are wistful and sometimes feisty. No rage against the dying of the light—just harmless fantasies of sexual infidelity and other might-have-beens. Barth has never been a writer of passion; rather, a restless intellect pondering passion and other curiosities. Highlights include the imagined-infidelity tale "The Ring," which expostulates on narrative structure and free-associates on the theme of rings in literature. "Click" is another fun foray attempting to replicate in linear text the fronded structure of hypertext, while gently lampooning electronic addictions. The story "9999" somehow turns mere numerals into poignant vocabulary through a math-obsessed couple who measure life events around numerically interesting dates.

The stories fit firmly within Barth's playful, thought-provoking catalog, but it's the ambitious frame-episodes that carry the emotional and philosophical freight of the book. Here, the character of the Original Author reflects the shock of a nation and the dilemma of the artist in the wake of 9/11/01. He is overwhelmed by a sense of irrelevance: "Impossible to concentrate in those circumstances: people doubtless still dying at Ground Zero with his every vainly scribbled word." When he's able to reenter his fictive world, his narrator Graybard and the personified muse carry out the Original Author's internal debate: Is it irrelevant or even sacrilegious to carry on with his project—with heedless life—in the wake of disaster? The dialogue of muse and narrator develops a defense of art as a necessity, not a luxury nor mere escapism.

The touchstone is the image of Scheherazade "telling marvelous stories with the ax virtually at her neck and the kingdom on the brink of collapse," a feeling shared by many in the terrorist age. But, as WYSIWYG asserts, "to tell irrelevant stories in grim circumstances is not only permissible but sometimes therapeutic. That their very irrelevance to the frame-situation may be what matters, whether the frame's grim and the tales are frisky or vice versa." At first, this sounds like a flip endorsement for escapism. But Barth doesn't provide blissful forgetting for long, nor does he makes terrorism's threat his sole subject, and for this, some readers will toss his work aside.

The frame is meant to be a jarring juxtaposition of two realities—continuance and loss. During these debates between storyteller and muse, Barth reminds readers of the attacks explicitly or through the subtle device of a blinking clock that repeats "9:11." The events won't be forgotten, but Graybard, like Scheherazade, must go "on with the story" (to quote the title of Barth's second collection), whether in denial or bravado. The first mentions of "9:11" prompt a reader's indignant thought that catastrophe deserves more airplay—something to vent sorrow, rage, and fear. This plaint is answered by the continuing narrative, which asserts there is another story beyond the searing national epic of loss.

How to enjoy the normalcy of life when terrorism has taken aim at one's home? "On the other hand, how not proceed with such innocent, pleasurable, irrelevant routine, savoring it all the more for its very irrelevance?" asks the Original Author. As the book's ending illustrates, it's a question that can't be completely answered, because the characters (and readers) are unsure—we don't know where the end is. We, like they, fear a chapter has been opened, not closed, and we're unsure whether perseverance is defiant or escapist.

It's hard to find peace with a book that leaves a bruise, insisting on remembrance without breast-beating catharsis. But the very gap between the dream of "irrelevant" stories and the world in which they are told has resounding realism. Perhaps now, more than ever, we need ringmasters like Barth. His stories remind us to examine the conveyance, wrapping paper, and price tag as part of the parcel of message. Ultimately, The Book of Ten Nights and a Night doesn't achieve the elegance of the earlier Funhouse; at the same time, its effort and concerns seem more vitally important.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

Clumsy
Top Shelf Productions ($10)

Unlikely
Top Shelf Productions ($14.95)
Jeffrey Brown

by Jennifer Przybylski

Autobiography is the longtime province of underground comics, and pioneers such as Harvey Pekar, Chester Brown, and Joe Matt alternately bore variations on the discursive, sometimes sour, human condition. Licentious tics, relationship fumbles, and self-loathing are the elements of their style; read it and be glad there is no marked resemblance.

Part of a more recent wave of self-aware diarists, Jeffrey Brown is unlike any of the above mentioned names on the roster. While his work is equally unexpurgated—girlfriend-boyfriend sex, drug use, and drinking to excess appear throughout—his panels are more about documenting shared intimacies in a soft, searching light. Clumsy, Brown's debut graphic novel, records Jeff and Theresa's long-distance relationship. While one might be initially tempted to criticize the rudimentary drawing style and crooked panels, the unschooled manner serves the narrative perfectly. Take the pyramid of spirited lines that jets from the rear of jockeying stock cars as the couple go lap for lap—the simplistic measure of velocity from a high school physical science text, and a fitting visual metaphor in Brown's nostalgia-driven work.

Clumsy is like listening to a personal account of a friend's breakup without the padding of consolation. All of the unthinking relationship breaches are catalogued: remote phone conversations; needing the other person more than they need you; trying to control their behaviors. But there are some really warm moments too: Jeff helps Theresa paint a table full of "Kitty Pots" for her pottery sale; Theresa cuts Jeff's hair and he actually likes it; the couple attend a taping of "The Jerry Springer Show," whooping and guffawing at the ridiculousness. Despite their closeness, however, it is easy to divine when the pulling away begins—a tribute to the universal nature of this story. Brown dedicates the book "for everyone who has ever loved and lost."

Unlikely is the aptly named prequel to Clumsy. Brown again recounts a failed pairing, this time with a cute girl named Allisyn. The style and panel structure remain loose, although Unlikely maintains a linear movement while Clumsy's moments seemingly dissolved into each other, moving forwards and backwards.

Unlikely reminds us that a get-together at a friend's house might end with five people, still clothed, in the same bed. Relationships aren't so much pursued but fallen into; the progress from marathon phone calls to uneasy lovers is a natural one. Yet the feeling that Jeff is more invested than the troubled, evasive Allysin is apparent almost from the start. The supportive bubble he extends to her is easy to understand, even when the reach is smacked away. Some of it is almost shaming, especially when Jeff and Allysin attempt to sleep with each other (it's his first time) and it goes badly: the stark panel of Jeff crying in the dark while Allysin sleeps is numbing. Movie tickets, Necco Valentine Hearts and a copy of Breakfast at Tiffany's are all lovingly rendered in miniature on the endpapers as "what is left" from their relationship. The knowledge Jeff arrives at might have come sooner if he were older, if this wasn't his first time. The dedication here reads "To everyone who ends up looking at the sky."

Jeffrey Brown's work is not precious, broken-heart type stuff, but instead renders the terrific blanches and indelible happiness one can inflict upon another. Perfect love is a ruse imagined by those who have never fallen. Together Clumsy and Unlikely consider the brilliance, the missteps, and the wrenching terminus.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

Goran Simic
Translated by Amela Simic
Brick Books ($15)

by Gilbert Wesley Purdy

On a continent where so much seems assured, the threat of devastation is exotic, shot through with a drama that can hardly be imagined. Consequently, we have long found our more compelling writers in translation and from regions at the edge of the industrialized Western world: South America, Eastern Europe, the Indian subcontinent, the Balkans.

This is not to say that exoticism is necessarily all that is involved. One need only consider a few of the names: Milosz, Neruda, Borges. There is something about the telluric experience that is fertile soil for poetry. Ironically, war, oppression and cobbled-together smokestack economies laid over centuries of agglomerate history somehow come together to produce such uniquely human figures.

Goran Simic is a Bosnian poet. His blunt poems about living in war-torn Sarajevo have gained him considerable reputation in Europe. His present volume—Immigrant Blues—promises to extend that reputation. Now seven years a Canadian immigrant, his work has gained an ease and a wider range of tone.

The war poems are clearly the best in the volume. "The Book of the Rebellion" bears comparison to Borges:

A man shoved it into my hands
warning me to forget his face that very instant
and making me swear that the book
would never get into the hands of the police.
I didn't even manage to tell him
how proud I was at joining.
He disappeared the same way
I disappeared the following week
after handing the book to somebody else.

To be more exact, these are poems about the aftermath of war. There are no longer bloated corpses everywhere along the way to buy a loaf of bread. "The Book of the Rebellion" is a poem with the advantage of distance, a stylized version of an absurdity the poet has intimately lived.

While "The Book of the Rebellion" suggests a level that Immigrant Blues does not achieve again, poems such as "The War is Over, My Love" are deeply human:

I enter an old clothing shop
and on the hangers I recognize my neighbors:
There,

Ivan's coat. We used the lining for bandages.
Look,
Hasan's shoes. Shoelaces are missing.
And Jovan's pants. The belt is gone.

The sympathetic identification of a person with her or his clothing is surely as old as clothing itself; in mall-less regions the identification remains particularly vivid. The effect on us, at the desensitizing distance of excess, remains strangely affecting.

The immigrant experience is sosufficiently foreign to our own that it makes for a promising subject. Poems such as "My Accent" and "An Immigrant Poem" introduce us, with uncommon success, to that world where everything is out of place. Yet there is a final category of poems in Immigrant Blues, those written (some even in English) by a surprisingly acculturated ex-Bosnian. These poems are neither about war nor the immigrant experience, and tend to have less to distinguish them from the vast number of poems written out of recognizable landscapes. They are predictably the least effective poems in the volume and their failures may imply the challenge Goran Simic faces in the work that lies ahead.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

Edited by Michael Cross
Avenue B Books ($12)

by Mark Tursi

Akira Kurosawa's film Dreams is an enthralling exploration of humankind's relationship with the imagination and the unconscious, as well as with the natural world, so it's no surprise that eleven cutting-edge poets have paid homage to it in this new anthology, aptly titled Involuntary Vision. As editor Michael Cross notes in his introduction, Kurosawa uses a poetic logic that is rich in "image, sound, ethos and texture"; like Kurosawa's characters, these poets reveal that the tragic and monstrous in our world is always inextricably, instinctually, and inexorably human. Their evocation of Kurosawa involves a critical exploration of human experience through oneiric and often apocalyptic language.

Though each poet presents a themed sequence, the collection is extremely diverse, ranging from the quirky sonnets of Julia Bloch to the language-centered prose poems of Geoffrey Dyer to the fragmented verse of Cynthia Sailers. With some of the poets, the connection to Kurosawa is completely explicit, as in Tanya Brolaski's "We Disparate Hellenism," which explores each story from the film with penetrating insight while calling attention to the way in which language destabilizes and disrupts perception and understanding: "Japan is too small, and in a sick red light. So I glutted (ate) my heart out. It began to leak toward morning, instructing me to Taiwan. Your embrace was almost too vicious. The breaking of certain blood vessels that made the time travel stop."

However, with many of these poems, the link to Kurosawa is implicit, tenuous, or seemingly non-existent—though the anthology remains a welcome and wonderful collection of "post-language" writers whose voices consider this inheritance and tradition, and then diverge from it in exciting ways. The book is essentially an anthology of the "New Brutalists," which as Cross notes is a name that was appropriated from Ashbery, and points toward a group of writers from the San Francisco Bay Area who, though fascinated with the processes of thought and imagination and how these impact the relation between reality and the 'self' via language, are equally interested in distorting and amplifying our understanding of human experience. (It is this distortion, and their concern with the tragic aspects of the human condition, that makes them "brutalists.") Although some of the writers in the collection might resist the label—and, as many other critics and reviewers have noted, a label such as this often amounts to nothing more than a marketing strategy—I would argue that it actually does describe an exciting new trajectory in contemporary American poetics. Like the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets before them, the New Brutalists exhibit an inherent suspicion in the way language filters our perception of reality and, therefore, a keen interest in the materiality of language. Yet, they depart significantly from the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E project as they are interested in signifying various aspects of emotion, reality, and experience, and obsessed with representing our cultural milieu in a way that seems more impressionistic than abstract.

Thus Kurosawa is only the lynchpin for the volume; what binds these eleven poets together is a desire to dismantle standard perceptions of reality and blur the boundary between imagination and reality, conscious and unconscious, thought and perception. Elizabeth Willis, for instance, provides a complex and contradictory vision of reality in her "Dream Anthology":

The random village declares itself
an independent blossom
Utopia cannot be seen
but costs you twice
Behind the dream behind the snow
someone closed the greenest door
on artificial islands

Willis casts language as an object in and of itself, while also questioning how language evokes an object or image and the way it supposedly produces meaning. That is, she calls attention to and disrupts standard signification, but she does not abandon it entirely. This intense interest in the materiality of language, coupled with an elegant and imagistic lexis, is as provocative as it is complex.

Stephen Ratcliffe is similarly interested in challenging the way we attempt to represent objective reality via language. In a straightforward and flat tone, he painstakingly describes reality piece by piece: "pink edge of cloud above ridge in the window opposite unmade / yellow and blue bed, sound of birds chirping in foreground / below it, waves breaking in channel." Ratcliffe takes Olson's notion of proprioception to a different level by attempting to capture the moment of the 'real' as it occurs in the always fleeting present.

Julia Bloch's "Strange Yellow Flowers" provokes twists and turns in meaning by exploring the ambiguity of signification and the multifaceted possibilities that emerge when words are assembled, reassembled, and placed in unexpected situations. She writes:

There again I've angered
the atmosphere. But there's
still these hips in long
light. It was a flurry
of news, a digital you,
then the thing itself.
Sounds as though we're
coughing up snow.

Her poems are playful and surprising in regard to the texture and surface of the language, but also disturbing in their vision of our muddled perception of reality.

Eli Drabman's poetry reverberates with the language of Jack Spicer, particularly in regard to what Ron Silliman calls "a vision of absolute Other." As in Spicer, overdetermination, negation, and effacement are Drabman's tools:

I can't even make
sentences correctly because
it seems never clear how
to stop and make some

thing cut through, that
lasts, without throwing up
a dazzle against the dazzle

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

every time the poem makes
an embarrassment of itself
beside what might be real.

Drabman challenges the way that signs have references, but this doesn't mean he abandons meaning for complete abstraction. In fact, he is often at his best, and funniest, when using words to point toward the 'real'. In a characteristically ironic tone, he asks, "Are the headaches I've been having / evidence of emerging genius or just / another clue that I've taken the wrong / path?"

These poems and others in Involuntary Vision introduce a new and exciting poetic sensibility that subverts stable notions of identity and challenges any certainty in the way we perceive reality or our own consciousness. As Cynthia Sailers writes in "The Myth of the Individual," "Like a colony of imaginary friends. We enjoy / These new lodgings. Symbols / For our private lungs, our illuminated rooms."

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004

Raymond Federman
Six Gallery Press/Journal of Experimental Fiction ($9.99)

by Karl Krause

Jorge Luis Borges's essay "The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader" identifies literature's ability to "become inflamed with its own virtue, fall in love with its own decline, and court its own demise." If literature is near death, Raymond Federman's Here and Elsewhere fans the flames. Basically a poetic biography, Here and Elsewhere voices memory, theory, metaphors, and devotions—a hodgepodge wrangled by a second, bold-faced voice. As in many of Federman's essays and novels, he includes himself in these voices as a third-personed "Federman." Joining Federman is the character "Moinous," an ominously paired moi and nous (me and we, in French), or, as Federman himself defines it (in "Federman," on www.federman.com), "the secret name Federman gives himself when he pretends to be a spy, or a musketeer, or a paratrooper, or a jazz musician, or a French lover, or an experimental writer."

Federman's reflexive narration reemphasizes the necessity and imperfections of writing, bordering different attempts to create—the artful dodging of inadequacy—with encouragement to forge ahead in spite of failure. For Borges, these failures were "the ocular distraction of metaphor, the auditory distraction of rhythm, and the surprises of an interjection or a hyperbaton." For Federman, the entire act of writing is flawed. Metaphors are hated and incongruous to the self, verbs tangle our world into doubtful relations, nouns cannot name what they name, adjectives and adverbs falsely describe. While not necessarily new, these ideas appear purposefully unembellished in Federman's poetry.

Federman's incessant pessimism for the problems of writing may find some empathy in recognition. Beyond this, Here and Elsewhere manages to become a ________ text (out of respect for Federman, let this blank adjective stand inexactly for something affirming and useful). Remarkable in Here and Elsewhere is Federman's sly working of stylishness—using its deceit and capacity to impress a superficial reading. His initial use of these tricks appears lame and misplaced, using puns ("you're everywhere here / in my house and in me / since you changed tense") and depicting kitschy products ("I had a hot dog smoked a pall mall"). But Federman repeats these superficial techniques to make a point: "a life of words words / that pell-mell babel of / read written spoken words" where his words crash into less obviously meaningful combinations that better carry senses claimed un-formable by nouns, adjectives, etc. These irrational collisions are Federman's most successful experiments: "so you want / a street / named after you / in your home town / when you change tense / Rue Féderman / so be it." Federman uses the falsities of language with precision to create a pointed voice, some harsh ridicule of writers seeking fame, and other wry articulations of popular form.

Theories and precision aside, the memories Here and Elsewhere invent, recall, and denounce are constructive. In a brief section that serves as a sort of devotional to a love interest (likely the "Erica" of the book's pretty dedication), Federman demonstrates a utility and beauty of language in communication and reconciliation: "have I ever told you how appeasing the light of your language is to me / have I ever told you how the smile of your language makes me smile." These lines are long, assured, liberated of concerns from a voice assiduously paired with encouraging censure.

Here and Elsewhere, its own critic and constraint, creates a full voice with occasional insights, such as "One can dance / in the dark / one can sing / in the dark / one makes / love in the dark / but poetry cannot / be read in darkness / that is perhaps / its greatest weakness." Assertive and ruthless in reason, Federman shows that literature is not dying. Elsewhere Federman himself has proclaimed the new fiction "will be deliberately illogical, irrational, unrealistic, non sequitur, and incoherent," a magic that Here and Elsewhere is not. By exploring the contemporary, Here and Elsewhere stakes itself deep in the present to make a point, with cautious risks—maybe deep enough to keep its claim from uprooting to future transcendence.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2004